From AGROVOC to the Agricultural Ontology Service / Concept Server - An OWL Model for Creating Ontologies in the Agricultural Domain

This paper illustrates the conversion from a traditional thesaurus in agriculture (AGROVOC) to a new system, the Agricultural Ontology Service Concept Server (AOS/CS). The Concept Server will serve as a multilingual repository of concepts in the agricultural domain providing ontological relationships and a rich, semantically sound terminology. The Food and Agriculture Organization recently developed the underlying model for this new system in the Web ontology language OWL. In this paper, we describe the purpose of this conversion and the use of OWL and highlight in particular the core features of the developed OWL model. We go on to explain how it evolves and differs from the traditional thesaurus approach.